Monarch Millionaire Expands to the Military

The Monarch Millionaire’s success resulted in the expansion of the financial literacy program to include the military students on campus. The Monarch Millionaire: Military Edition has plans to follow a similar class structure, but will tailor it towards financial issues that arise for military students.

The program is structured around “financial information that we believe is important to students. In a lot of ways it does cater to ODU students because we teach them about the specific financial aid process here at school, which is different than other universities,” said Diane Dougherty, the public relations and marketing specialist for Student Financial Assistance.

The new military program plans to structure the class to cover the GI Bill, veteran’s affairs benefits and ways to speed up the process when waiting on the VA Office. “We teach them about Virginia benefits… They didn’t know they could apply for financial aid from the state also,” said Dougherty.

Wayne Rudolph, a command financial specialist in the Navy, will teach the classes for the Military Millionaires. Military veterans, military-dependent students and ROTC students can sign up for the classes.

“The Military Monarch Millionaire is different because we, as veterans, are modifying weeks four and five to include specific Military information… We will be discussing various facets of Chapter 33 VA Education benefits, military retirement pay, drill pay, a little about the VA loan program,” said Rudolph.

Currently, the students enrolled in the military classes will see delays until enrollment increases for the spring semester.

The original Monarch Millionaire classes will be starting up this week with a similar agenda as last semester. The one-hour-a-week sessions will touch on budgeting, banking, credit, financial aid and life after college.

End of semester surveys taken by last semester’s sessions expressed the desire for more knowledge about finances. The life after college information has expanded into a Monarch Millionaire II program. The program expands on topics that the students suggested in the surveys such as bonds.

Students who were in the fall sessions are the only students who can sign up for the Monarch Millionaire II. In addition to more classes, the fall graduates of the program can also assist in teaching future sessions. Greek Millionaire graduates can receive service hours for teaching the courses.

An added benefit of the Monarch Millionaire program is the ability to put it on a resume. At the end of the course the students receive a financial literacy certificate and partake in a graduation ceremony at the end of the program. The spring graduation date is set for the week of March 24. The final date is tentative.

The Career Management Center has taken over a session for Leap students, which will also start in February. The sessions will be similar to the Monarch Millionaire curriculum but will include only Leap program students.

Over the variety of spring sessions, the program brought in twice as many students as last semester. The fall graduated 90 students while the spring aims to graduate between 200 and 300 students.

In the future, Dougherty hopes the program will expand to a permanent course that students must take at ODU. She also hopes to develop the program into a model that ODU can sell to other universities to bring money back into the finance department, which will in turn fund development for the program.

If you wish to sign up for the Monarch Millionaire classes, email MonarchMillionaire@odu.edu or go to facebook.com/monarchmillionaire.